Illness is a Matter of Will and Posture
This week in therapy I poked at the way I believe the world is not safe. It’s apparently a belief I need to reframe to feel like a human. I don’t know how that’s supposed to work though, because I checked and it isn’t. “You can’t be abandoned as an adult” is a thing privileged people yell when they’re ignoring all the people our world abandons.
But I did some LI work and poked at a feel I had earlier. I was super ashamed when I talked to DerbyK about suppressing vomiting, and you basically didn’t believe it was possible to exert significant control. But I know it is, because I learned to do it when I was very young and practiced it for years. Avoidance when possible, through a variety of means, but suppression and hiding when it was not. I realized when I had some NO that I am strongly motivated to deny the sensation of dizziness and many effects of altered consciousness. For example, I can bring Sp02 reading down into the 60s while pretending things are fine, and into the 30s before I really start to feel disabled.
Because when I was very young – before I went to school that included lunch, I often was too hunger to act normally. So I learned to compensate and hide. Instead of letting myself pass out I learned to lay down (ideally on something cool) and elevate my legs to try to stay conscious. That was the one piece of advise Mother had given me for coping with being sick. I applied it to all the wrong things because I was 4 and because I had lots of health problems, and I remember being sick and being in that position and being told I would be feeling better if I was doing it right. It would work if I was actually in pain and not just whining for attention.
But it worked for having low blood sugar, and often if I could lay for a few minutes it was possible to recover enough to continue my day for a while. People thought it was weird but I didn’t let them know I was in distress so mostly they let it go as acceptable behavior from a 5-year-old. And they liked it 1000 times better than if I passed out. Once I was in 1st grade I got to eat at least one meal a day most days, at least when I was at school, so I didn’t have to deal with it as often after that. It’s still the default coping mechanism I imagine when things are real rough – one of the few body-focused things I imagine might help me be calmer, though only when I’m already pretty close to death.
Later in undergrad where I lost access to transportation and cooking it was a problem again. One day at work it happened. I laid down and fought off loss of consciousness and recovered in just a few minutes, but it made people upset. I could pass it off as being a weird kid. They physical transported me to the campus clinic, despite my objections and insistence that I was fine. I felt fine, by my standards. I didn’t even really believe I felt poorly while I was about to faint. But everyone was very afraid, so I agreed to see a physician. I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it, but I risked it because it was very clear that was the easiest way to make the attention stop.
When I saw the nurse she was very worried about my blood sugar. When I finally saw the physician half an hour later he literally dismissed the incident and sent me away without discussion. Reinforcing my belief that physicians can’t help me, that how I feel isn’t important, that I have to hide my reactions to protect myself from normal people who don’t understand why my body doesn’t work like theirs. I paid for that clinic visit I didn’t want to go to, where I didn’t get treatment, and what I got was proof that I need to hide better when I’m losing consciousness, so I don’t upset anyone. I haven’t been caught almost dying since then.
For similarly bad reasons I learned to often be able to control vomiting too. It’s so reflexive an action in me that the only time I’ve been able to vomit, even when very ill, is while I’m so drunk I am already at reduced levels of control and simultaneously surprised by my level of drunkenness. Otherwise it’s been decades. Not decades since my body tried to vomit, but decades since I’ve been able to let it. I’m able to use the survival fear of being discovered to suppress it in almost all circumstances. It’s sort of hard for me to believe that other people can’t avoid it, especially “minor” versions like stress vomiting or emotional or physically disgust. I feel like I ought to repress it even when I get the wind knocked out of me, or after I’ve started to spit up a little.
And I’m ashamed to have lived that life. Or the one where being blasted in NO isn’t extreme enough for my brain to believe that I’m dying. Where I work to suppress the impact of drugs like I’m training with iocane powder. I can’t get high because I need to be ready for everything all the time. I must not feel high even if I am, so I don’t let it affect my choices. So no one will be able to hurt me.
The story is still all a mess. I’ll take another shot when the pieces come together.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
